Choosing a Web Marketing Company – Part One

If you have been struggling with SEO on your own, it’s time to hand the reins to the professionals. You could actually be doing more harm than good in running your own SEO campaigns. Business owners usually spend hours, weeks and months running their own SEO only to find the results for their website traffic failed to improve, or even worse, it got reduced. You might spend so much time on SEO that your business actually starts to fail.

Don’t take the risk. Hire a good web marketing company to take care of your website optimization and social media marketing for you. With so many SEO companies trading today you can’t say you don’t have help available. So why is it that so many SEO companies are unreliable?

The problem with SEO is that it’s a relatively new marketing process. The Internet marketing boom caused many so-called professionals to jump on the bandwagon. Very often, they have no experience in SEO and attempt to con companies into signing up for their SEO packages. As with any industry, there are many scam companies out there, but it’s easy to avoid these when you know what to look for and how to read between the lines.

It’s quite a good idea to learn a little about SEO, so that you can ask relevant and pertinent questions before making a decision about who to hire. Many scam companies will promise to get you on the first page of Google within a couple of days. There is NO WAY they could ever do this. It would take a couple of days alone (at the very least) to analyze your traffic and to work out a suitable strategy to get your website noticed.

Tips for Choosing the Right web marketing Company

• If a company promises to rank number in Google, don’t simply take their word for it. Nobody can guarantee a number 1 ranking, but if a company says they can get you in the top 10 spots that’s good reason to hire them.

• Get recommendations from business associates, friends and family. An SEO company with good word of mouth recommendations is one not to be ignored.

• Ask around in online forums. There are many forums for webmasters and online professionals and it’s easy to get advice about which SEO company to use. However, owners of SEO companies also hang out in these forums so be sure to ask more questions before you hire a company.

• Turn to Google – You can Google the company name to make sure the company exists and it’s not simply a fly by night setup. If the company is scamming their clients, then you will probably find complaints from past users on the web. However, the lack of negative comments doesn’t mean the company is good. It could simply mean they are trading under a different name or that they haven’t had many customers. Look for a company that has lots of positive comments and testimonials.

• If you are looking for a local SEO company, search for them on Google – not by name, just as you would search for any local company in your area. Only use an SEO company that is ranking well in Google. You need to use a company that has its own SEO house in order after all!

• Ask a company you are interested in hiring for examples of websites they have worked on. Any company worth its salt will be more than happy to give you details of past successes. Most genuine companies will have details of testimonials on their websites. If a company rejects your request for testimonials for confidential reasons, this should set alarm bells ringing. Even if some clients have requested confidentiality about their details, the SEO company should still have some testimonials to show you.

• Ask them what keywords they are ranking their own website for. If they don’t rank well for these keywords then it makes you wonder how good their services are.

• Do they use automated submissions to build links? This practice is frowned upon by the search engines and could get your website banned from page ranking. Steer clear!